Unnatural Acts

The new opera Edward II – which recently had its world première at the Deutsche Oper – is a mere ninety minutes in length, but composer Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini and librettist Thomas Jonigk have managed to fit more discomfort into its brief duration than many musical dramatists will manage in a lifetime. It is a work of profound sexual anxiety and corporeal revulsion propelled by a dazzling, often unsettling score which scatters shards of conventional dissonance over ominous rumbles and surround-sound hisses. Yet for all its lines of unprintable dialogue and scenes of shocking violence, it is neither gratuitous nor inaccessible; beneath its tactics of provocation, one finds the familiar presence of a classic tragedy.

Mr Jonigk’s taut libretto – drawn loosely from Marlowe’s famous play, along with Holinshed’s Chronicles (Marlowe’s…